Due to recent advances in technology, computer users are now able to enjoy many features that provide an improved user experience. For example, users can play media and multimedia content on various computing devices, such as personal, laptop, or handheld computers, as well as mobile phones and other portable media devices. In some media environments, a computing device has access to a computer-readable medium storing media files such as Moving Picture Experts Group audio layer-3 (MP3) files and Windows® Media technologies audio (WMA) and video (WMV) files. Many computers today are also able to play compact discs (CDs) and digital versatile discs (DVDs) and have an Internet connection capable of streaming and downloading audio and video.
In the realm of personal digital media, there may be several interesting “scopes” of media. For example, at one end of the spectrum, a user may store a personal media collection locally on one or more machines or devices. A typical user's local or personal media collection includes perhaps a few thousand media items. At the other end of the spectrum, online retailers (e.g., FYE.com), online media sources (e.g., Microsoft Corporation's MSN® Music service), and online subscription services (e.g., Napster® and RealNetwork's Rhapsody® digital music services) often have libraries of more than a million media items available to the user remotely (e.g., via the internet). A general interaction between these two scopes is to extract media from one and insert the items into the other by purchasing and/or downloading media content. But the size of the service library clearly eclipses that of the local library and the rate at which a user consumes media is relatively low when compared to the amount of media released during the same time period. In other words, far more media items are released on any given day than a single user would purchase. As such, the integration of the two scopes has been left undone. Moreover, conventional user interfaces, implementation models, and the like are also very different, which complicates the integration of local and remote media libraries.